Chapter 269: Humanity's Divine Protectors?
Tony Stark's voice carried an unmistakable note of relief. Thank god the Chat Group had Josuke as a healer.
As long as a person's soul remained intact, Crazy Diamond could restore them — even if their body had been essentially flattened. The destructive output of Stands in the JoJo series was often understated in the anime, but the variety of their abilities was genuinely remarkable.
Crazy Diamond restored anything. The World stopped time. Crimson King erased time. The Fool commanded sand. The breadth of Stand abilities could leave anyone's head spinning.
In the current situation, Crazy Diamond was objectively the most useful.
The new Stand Josuke had drawn from the grand prize package at the Mid-Autumn event — nobody in the group knew what its ability was yet. Stand abilities as a category were difficult to apply in a fight like this anyway. The Void Beasts were too physically robust for most elegant tricks to land cleanly. A Stand that released viruses, for instance, ran into the problem that these creatures might simply treat the virus like air freshener.
The fifteen minutes passed. After water and high-calorie food, everyone's stamina had made a meaningful recovery.
Sengoku, as a Zoan user, recovered fastest — nearly twenty minutes of rest had brought him back to roughly ninety percent capacity. Kaguya had reached sixty to seventy percent. The gap in recovery rate between Zoan physiology and everything else was difficult to overstate.
Sengoku rose, worked through a quick stretch, and his joints produced a series of sharp cracks. The faint pressure radiating from him wasn't a product of rank or long-held authority.
It was Conqueror's Haki leaking out unconsciously.
In One Piece's official character data, Fleet Admiral Sengoku — who on the surface appeared to be nothing more than the World Nobles' loyal instrument — possessed all three forms of Haki. Meanwhile Garp, widely considered the most natural candidate for Conqueror's Haki, had somehow never been confirmed to have it in the official records.
Sengoku noticed the leak almost immediately and reined it in.
"You three rest another ten minutes. Your current recovery level isn't enough to sustain anything useful."
Kaguya knew he was right. Their recovery rate simply couldn't match a Zoan user's. Ten more minutes to push back toward eighty or ninety percent of peak.
Sengoku stepped back into Moonwalk and was gone.
His return to the battle immediately reduced the pressure on the remaining seven. The man was the Fleet Admiral of the Marine Headquarters — formidable in his own right, and built to absorb punishment in ways that most combatants weren't. A perfect front-liner.
When the Void Beast count had dropped to roughly four hundred, the dynamic of the fight had shifted noticeably. One thousand simultaneous targets was a different category of problem from four hundred. And with Sengoku re-engaged, and the three others — Kaguya, Tony, and Wolffy — about to return as well, the configuration improved substantially.
Four of them holding fifty Void Beasts occupied and slowed was a feasible arrangement. That left the group's top-tier members to cycle through and finish the restrained ones.
Void Beast after Void Beast fell from altitude and landed on the growing pile of carcasses below. The bodies had been accumulating for days. The pile had reached a volume roughly equivalent to a fifth of the Himalayas by now. New bodies landing barely registered against that mass — the existing pile cushioned the impact.
"Gurararara — my bisento's chipped. A little notch right at the cutting edge. Old companion that's served for decades is finally showing the strain. It's fine — once this is over I'll have it repaired."
Whitebeard regarded the blade with brief, genuine affection before the expression shifted to something harder. His next strike carried the full weight of the Tremor-Tremor Fruit through the edge.
A Void Beast threw everything it had into dodging. Earth's gravity was still working against the creatures — they had the size to be slowed by it, and that fraction of a second was enough. The blade scored a deep wound across its body. Blood, internal organs, a chunk of viscera larger than a house detached and fell. The scene was the kind that would have been deeply disturbing under any other circumstances.
At this point, everyone present had been through the Chat Group's Arena. They'd seen worse.
"The collateral damage has been substantial. I've lost count of how many cities were affected." Kizaru finished a single attack that eliminated a Void Beast, exhaled once, and murmured to himself. "Though these carcasses might compensate the country for the losses. Void Beast blood is extraordinarily vitalizing. Give it a month and these two hundred and fifty thousand square kilometers will be the most fertile farmland on this planet."
Then his expression shifted abruptly and he converted into light, flashing a kilometer sideways.
"Hey, hey — can't you enormous things just use physical attacks against me? Why does every single one of you insist on the energy bolts? Those are dangerous!"
The Void Beasts showed no sign of comprehending this request.
Their assault on him continued at full intensity, completely unbothered by the five hundred-plus of their number that had already died. No hesitation, no apparent reaction to the deaths happening around them. They fought as if each kill was an isolated event, as if the concept of looking at the pile of their dead and reconsidering hadn't occurred to them.
Killing machines with intelligence but without self-preservation instinct. Whatever kind of creature was produced by living in the void between dimensions — this was apparently what it produced.
Ryū wasn't watching Kizaru's situation. He was managing his own.
Even Yukari and Dragon Tohru had started to feel the weight of sustained combat. For Ryū, it was the same.
He decomposed a Void Beast's energy bolt into clean harmless energy, then drove an Armament Haki-coated fist into the creature's skull — a massive concave impact opened up, brain matter scattered, and the creature was done.
He didn't have time to register the kill. Five or six more were already converging on him from multiple angles.
He noticed, in passing, that the dark void in the sky was narrowing. Gradually closing.
And as it closed, the Void Beasts grew more agitated.
Good. Agitated meant exposure. Exposed meant weak points. Every increase in their desperation was a corresponding increase in exploitable openings.
The hours turned. One, two — five, six — seven, eight.
Day to night. Night back to day.
The carcass pile grew.
Five hundred. Six hundred. Seven hundred. Eight hundred.
Across the entire Saekano doujin world, humanity went quiet. Every screen on the planet was showing the same footage. People watched without speaking, every hand gripping something harder as the last hundred Void Beasts fell one by one.
Not from anger — the Void Beasts had demolished everything within reach, and anyone watching with functional eyes understood exactly which side was the threat.
This was something else. It was the grip of something held too tightly for too long finally beginning to release.
The planet's crisis appeared to be ending.
Those mysterious figures — whatever they had been before any of this — were something different now.
To the billions watching, they were gods.
The gods of this Earth.
Powerful and incomprehensible divine beings, standing between humanity and extinction.
☆☆☆
-> 20 Advanced chapters Now Available on Patreon!!
-> https://www.pat-reon.co-m/c/Hollowborn
(Just remove the hyphen (-) to access patreon normally)
If you like this novel please consider leaving a review that's help the story a lot Thank you